"Walk right ahead, madam," he urged. "You're holding us back."
The fat woman obediently took a wild step forward, the stair bucked and she stepped firmly backward and sat down violently on Sara's head. Pen and Jim roared with the crowd. The red-headed woman scrambled to the topmost stair again, then turned and shook her fist in Sara's face.
"Don't you touch me again, you brute!" she screamed. Then she summoned all her energies and took another dignified step upward. Again the stairs bucked. Again the fat woman sat down on Sara's hat. Again the onlookers were overwhelmed with laughter. Pen and Jim feebly supported each other as they rode up and down on the lower step. Sara pushed the woman off his head and again she turned on him.
"There! You made me swallow my gum! And I'll bet you call yourself a gentleman!"
Sara, red-faced but grinning, took a mighty step upward, gripped the woman firmly around the waist and lifted her down the opposite side of the stile. Pen and Jim followed with a mad scramble. For a moment it looked as if the red-headed woman would murder Sara. But as she looked at his young beauty her middle-aged face was etched by a gold-toothed smile.
"Gee, that's more fun than I've had for a year!" she exclaimed and she melted into helpless laughter.
Coney Island is of no value to the fastidious or the lazy. Coney Island belongs to those who have the invaluable gift of knowing how to be foolish, who have felt the soul-purging quality of huge laughter, the revivifying power of play. Lawyers and pickpockets, speculators and laborers, poets and butchers, chorus girls and housewives at Coney Island find one common level in laughter. Every wholesome human being loves the clown.
Spent with laughing, Pen finally suggested lunch, and Jim led the way to an open-air restaurant.
"Let's," he said with an air of inspiration, "eat lunch backward. Begin with coffee and cheese and ice cream and pie and end with clam chowder and pickles."
"Nothing could be more perfect!" exclaimed Pen enthusiastically, and as nothing surprises a Coney Islander waiter, they reversed the menu.